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04 Mar 2015 8:13:21am

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I had a nice chuckle at "(Atheists) use how questions to answer who and why questions and it will not work."

Imagine a young child walking in the rain for the first time and let's assume there's been a long drought, so rain is an unusual phenomenon for the child. The child may well ask "Who is throwing the water at me?" and even "Why is someone throwing water at me?". These are nonsense questions, because there is a false assumption buried in them, ie "There must be someone throwing water at me because I know of no other mechanism by which water might get on my head." The child is assuming agency where there isn't any.

Parents trying to answer the child's question shouldn't leap into answering the "who" or "why" question, should they?

Or the child might ask "Why is there water falling on my head?" This is a "why" question which is crying out for a "how" answer, unless the child stresses the word 'my', why is the rain falling on MY head?

Here the child is assuming meaning, assuming that the water falling from the sky was fated to fall on his head and his head alone. Or it's variation of the "why am I here?" question: why am I standing in just the right spot to have this raindrop fall on my head?

Are we really going to engage the child in discussion as if the individual drops of rain falling on his head were of significance?

No, we're going to explain about evaporation and precipitation. Well, I might. Jensen might want to explain it with a nice easy "God did it."

The child has youth and ignorance to excuse him for his erroneous assumptions. I don't know how old Jensen is.

It does strike me as I write this that it is not the child with the questions who is at fault for coming up with the wrong questions. But if someone filled his head with nonsense in response to the wrong questions, that person would be at fault. No?